The Second Half of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe

The thing that struck me most from this part of the reading was the extreme and terrible cases in which the community took violent action against supposed witches in their midst.  Often times they were even more brutal in their punishment then the secular or religious courts had been.  The instances I found the most appalling were those in which women were trapped in their homes, which were then set on fire, causing them to be burned alive.  Even thought some witches were burned alive as punishment set forth by the courts when the witch trails were still occurring, there were many who were simply beheaded or at least strangled before they were subjected to such a horrific fate.  The fact that members of a community could be personally responsible for the death of someone they had known their whole life baffles me.  However, they would not have taken such drastic actions if they had not truly believed that they were in danger and that the supposed witch was causing their misfortunes.

Until this class, and more specifically this reading, I always thought that the Enlightenment and other such intellectual movements had caused an end to the belief in witchcraft, and that was why the witch-trails had stopped.  It is somewhat disconcerting to realize that something you had always held to be true is actually not at all factual.  In reality, the decline in the prosecution of witch-trails led to the decline in the belief in witchcraft, although this belief never came to a total end as there are still people today who believe in magic and witchcraft.  It was quite interesting to see how different countries and regions throughout Europe handled the decline in witch-trails as well as the continued belief by many in witchcraft afterwards.  There were many similarities of events that all these places shared, but it was the difference in time in which these events occurred that I found the most interesting.  For example, the Dutch Republic had their last government sanctioned execution in 1609 while Spain did not have their last execution until 1781. 

I think that the continued belief in witchcraft, especially by the rural lower class, makes a great deal of sense.   The problems that had caused witchcraft allegations in the first place had not simply disappeared so how could a belief that had been held for so long disappear over night.  Even members the elite class who publicly claimed to no longer believe in the uneducated superstition about witchcraft still often privately believed in magic.  A disbelief in witchcraft allowed the elite to feel superior, especially intellectually, from the country bumpkin who still put horseshoes on their door.